Unemployed men queue for handouts of bread in New York during the Great Depression.
Photograph: Bettmann Archive

The insufficiency of charity

By W McG Eagar 29 June 1931

I did not go to see a bread line in New York. The poor devils who queue up for relief in kind had, I thought, been photographed and gazed at quite often enough. But within a few yards of the Pennsylvania Terminal Station, I saw one morning an even more distressing picture – a dime line.

Stretching for hundreds of yards, it must have numbered some thousands of men, marshalled in platooons, with gaps here and there to allow foot traffic to cross the road.

The head of the queue was slowly filing past a Roman Catholic church to receive a coin from a Franciscan monk. Some of the men removed their caps before they reached the giver; others touched their caps as they received the alms; others, sunk in hebetude or fearful of risking recognition, kept their headgear fast and passed on without a sign.

Now there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that savings are exhausted, family resources strained to breaking-point, and the margin of temporary and part-time jobs cruelly restricted. The simple expedient of running into debt is no longer effective.

Experiences on the road

From our London staff27 October 1932

These Lancashire protesters – they call themselves and are generally called “hunger-marchers” – are nearly all sturdy young men in their twenties. Among them are many cotton operatives, but there are workers in most of the important Lancashire industries – engineers, miners, seamen, general labourers.

They carried red banners, some adorned with the hammer-and-sickle device. The banners bore such inscriptions as “Down with the Means Test”, “Down with the National Government”, and “Lancashire Protests Against the Baby-starvers”. These are men from Manchester, Liverpool, and most of the cotton towns …

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As they went along they collected their quota of signatures for the petition against the means test, whch is said to have been signed by about 1,000,000 people altogether. They invariably held an open-air meeting in the towns, and have met with little opposition from the crowds. The best test of the feeling towards them is the amount of money collected by the way, and this, they report, has been much more than expected.

The two places where there was “trouble” were Birmingham and Stratford-on-Avon, and in both cases apparently it followed from the fact that local voluntary arrangements were not adequate, and the marchers were forced to go to the Poor Law institution for the night.

At Birmingham they strenuously objected to the breakfast of bread and margarine offered them at the workhouse, their point being that they were not paupers. Accordingly they marched away breakfastless, with a banner “We have had no breakfast”.

Famine in North Caucasus

[The writer of this article recently visited the North Caucasus and the Ukraine in order to see for himself, and to record, how the collectivism of agriculture in Soviet Russia was affecting the lives of the peasants.]

25 March 1933

“How are things with you?” I asked one man. He looked around anxiously to see that no soldiers were about. “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away,” he said, and hurried on.

This is what I heard again and again and again. “We have nothing. They have taken everything away.” It was true. They had nothing. It was also true that everything had been taken away.

The famine is an organised one. Some of the food that has been taken away from them – and the peasants know this quite well – is still being exported to foreign countries …

It is difficult to get people who are starving and who know that, whatever happens, they must go on starving for at least three more months, and probably five, to talk about or take any great interest in the future. To them, the question of bread, of how to get enough food to keep just alive to-day and to-morrow, transcends all others.

Hitler on his moderation

Adolf Hitler relaxes in the German mountain retreat of Obersalzberg. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

“I only ask four years; after that the nation can do what it will with me – crucify me if it likes,” said Hitler during an interview which he gave this afternoon to a small group of British and American journalists.

There was no middle course left for Germany, he said. Either the Bolshevik standard would fly over Germany or she would recover herself. Appealing for no premature judgment of the press of the world on his Government, he asked that its deeds should be awaited.

“I have been represented as having made bloodthirsty and firebrand speeches against foreign countries, and now the world is surprised at my moderation,” he went on. “I never delivered firebrand speeches against foreign countries – even my speeches of ten years ago can testify to that. Anyone like myself who knows what war is, is aware of what a squandering of effort, or rather consumption of strength, is involved.”

As to a possible future war, the result could only be conjectured, and therefore nobody wanted peace and tranquillity more than himself and Germany. “But like all other nations, we insist upon equality and our proper place in the world, just as much as the Englishman insists upon the same thing for his country.”

How the New Government Hides the Truth

From a special correspondent in Germany28 March 1933

There is a widespread belief that Germany has been through a period in which some deplorable but nevertheless natural excesses have been committed – natural in so far as revolutions are habitually accompanied by a certain effervescence that usually leads to disorder and mob violence.

Indeed, amongst the supporters of the Hitlerite regime there is a certain pride – pride because the “revolution” was carried out with so little bloodshed, and the phrase “unbloodiest revolution in history” has become a favourite catchword.

The Hitlerite victory is not a revolution but a counter-revolution. There have been both revolutions and counter-revolutions less bloody, and as for the belief that the violence of the last few weeks has been of the kind natural in a period of excitement, it is necessary to state categorically that this belief is wholly erroneous. To hold it is wholly to misconceive the character of the Hitlerite counter-revolution.

The German Government, and more particularly Captain Göring, who, no less than Hitler himself, is the dictator of Germany, by admitting a few and denying the many excesses … attempt not only to conceal by far the greater and by far the more terrible part of the truth, but also to make themselves and their so-called “revolution” appear unique and resplendent by reason of the kindness and the magnanimity of its leaders, and the prodigious decency and self-discipline of their followers.

Thus they convert a thing of shame into an object of self-congratulation and boastful pride. This they are able to do all the more easily because they have the power – there is no press in Germany, and no news that is not all obsequiousness to the will of the dictatorship can be told; no truth can be told by the defeated Opposition, and no falsehood told by the Government can be publicly denied.

This opportunity for spreading untruth and suppressing truth is exploited to the utmost, and with such success that even in Berlin, the scene of countless horrible outrages, there are many persons who will assert with entire good faith that nothing unusual has happened, because they are allowed to see and hear nothing.

Town of Ten Thousand in Ruins

Bilbao28 April 1937

Guernica, a town of some 10,000 inhabitants, was yesterday reduced to a mass of burning ruins by countless numbers of German ‘planes which kept up a continuous bombing for three and a half hours.

The full story of yesterday’s massacre is not yet known, but what details there are are horrible enough. It is now disclosed that the rebel ‘planes bombed and set fire to isolated farmhouses for a distance of five miles around Guernica. Even flocks of sheep were machine-gunned.

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To-day I visited what remains of the town. I was taken to the entrance of a street like a furnace which no one had been able to approach since the raid. I was shown a bomb shelter in which over fifty women and children were trapped and burned alive. Everywhere is a chaos of charred beams, twisted girders, broken masonry, and smouldering ashes, with forlorn groups of inhabitants wandering in search of missing relatives.

I picked up one incendiary shell which failed to explode. It was made of aluminium, weighed nearly two pounds, and was liberally stamped with German eagles.

When I visited the town again this afternoon, it was still burning. Most of the streets in the centre were impassable, so that it is still unknown how many victims there are. In the ruins, the fires have been so extensive that many bodies will never be recovered.

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History stopped in 1936 – after that, there was only propaganda. So said George Orwell of an era when the multiple miseries of the Great Depression were compounded by the ruthless media strategies of Hitler and Stalin